The Back to School edition

Let's get straight to it.

In the News:

• The best retailers by category, according to Newsweek. (CSA)
• Alibaba - cautious spending isn’t just in the US, it’s in China too. (Reuters)
• Walmart - raised its sales guidance for the year to 4.75% growth. It’s driven by value buying. (Bloomberg)
• Dinner sausage sales increases are another value buying indicator.
• Jason Goldberg - posted his analysis of Q2 ecommerce sales data from the Department of Commerce. His take: The big are getting bigger, everyone else is losing ground.
• Walmart - is pulling back on drone deliveries everywhere except Dallas-Ft Worth. The goal is keeping them under $7/delivery. The current cost is $30/delivery.?(Axios)
• Walgreen’s - Appoints New Chief Merchandiser, Head of Digital to Aid Turnaround Efforts. (Retail Touchpoints)
• Target - is getting much better at combating shrink. Closing its nine most theft-prone stores certainly helped. It was also noted that Dollar General converted 12,000 of its stores away from self-checkout this year. (Yahoo Finance)
• Macy’s - delivered earnings above expectations for Q2 but lowered their forecast for the rest of the year.
• Gap - One year in, CEO Dickson is fixing fundamentals for a sales turnaround. (Fortune)
• REI - CEO faces the big problems of cutting the two years of losses ($311M last year) while keeping their coop culture and addressing employee unionization and higher costs vs their competitors like Dick’s and Walmart. (Fortune)
• Consumer Goods Technology - did a comprehensive review of retail and consumer goods analytics. 26% of retail and consumer goods leaders say their data quality is poor in comparison with competitors. Many also struggle with data management (38%) and analytics strategy (35%). 44% are working towards using shared data sources. Thanks CDP Institute
• SurveyMonkey - did a report on The CX Gap. While 92% say customer service is very important, only 24% of consumers said their last interaction with a company exceeded their expectations. There were several other gaps highlighted. The main point is that consumers expect basics done well like short wait times.?
• PMAX Incrementality - The team at Haus Analytics published a very good analysis of this.

Our Partners:

• Shopify and Youtube - expanded their partnership. All eligible Shopify Plus and Advanced merchants in the U.S. can now sign up for YouTube Shopping’s affiliate program.
• Shopify - hired a new CTO from Microsoft, Mikhail Parakhin. This adds their Microsoft connections with Microsoft’s current CTO, Kevin Scott, joining Shopify’s board last month.
• Shopify - posted about the PE firm, Stride, and some of the results they’ve achieved with their brands.
• Klaviyo - released two important new capabilities in their updated attribution model and AI testing.
• Listrak - announced an update to their Shopify Plus Certified App. Their AI now powers identity resolution, predictive segmentation, product recommendations, data sync and automated coupon generation.
• Recommerce platform Trove acquired their competitor, @Recurate. Trove is used by brands like Patagonia for their Worn Wear site. Recurate is used by Steve Madden and Outerknown. I like both platforms for their ability for brands to take control of worn goods and even incorporate with returns. It’s a good sustainability play. Another option for recommerce is Arrive, as used by Yeti.
• Recharge - is throwing down serious cash and prizes for their Tomorrow Brand Challenge.??
• Happy Returns, a UPS Company - was featured in Fortune. I learned a new term: BORIS: “buy online, return in store.” They also power the Shein returns that Forever 21 accepts at their stores.
• PostPilot - The direct mail platform is launching Acquisition AI on September 9th. This builds lookalike audiences based on their large direct mail dataset.